Start Climate Summit Week Right: March.

September 19, 2014

Bill Scher

The White House will be applying a “full-court press” on the climate during the United Nations Climate Summit next week. In addition to President Obama’s address to the summit, which will detail all that he is trying to accomplish by executive action, the Cabinet will be unleashed.

The Treasury Secretary will speak to the Brookings Institute about how we can cap carbon and grow the economy. The Environmental Protection Agency will be meeting with corporate executives to win commitments to reduce emissions. The heads of Agriculture, Interior, Transportation and Office of Management and Budget all will be speaking on the importance of averting a climate crisis.

All of this activity is to show the 120 nations attending the summit that the United States has stepped up, and now it’s the rest of the world’s turn.

It appears on track to be largest climate march in history, and possibly the most consequential, if it can pressure and inspire the international community to forge a real agreement to collectively cut our greenhouse gas emissions.

The U.N. is our best and last chance for a global solution to the climate crisis. No one country can solve it alone, and President Obama is already doing as much as the leader of one superpower country can do, considering the constraints put on him by the Republican-led House.

The people who need to be pushed will be in New York. And this is the time to push them, as they begin work on an agreement that must be finalized by December 2015, when the United Nations Climate Change Conference meets in Paris.

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About Bill Scher

Bill Scher is the Online Campaign Manager at Campaign for America's Future, and the executive editor of LiberalOasis.com. He is the author of Wait! Don't Move To Canada!: A Stay-and-Fight Strategy to Win Back America, a regular contributor to Bloggingheads.tv and host of the LiberalOasis Radio Show weekly podcast. He has opinion articles that have been published by the New York Times, Minneapolis Star Tribune and Omaha World-Herald, and has made appearances on CNN, MSNBC and NPR among other TV and radio outlets.